Prior to the advent of video recorders and VCR's, consumers desiring to capture action scenes were given the single choice of deciding whether to record the action on 8 mm or 16 mm movie film. The consumer recorded scene after scene in sequence until the roll of movie film in the camera was exhausted. The film was then developed for subsequent, sequential viewing. With the advent of VHS, VCR's, and Camcorders, the consumer could now record action scenes, record over scenes not desired to be kept, and add features offered through the camcorder, such as modified lighting.
Audio/video devices, such as Hewlett Packard's DVD Movie Writer™, can now take multimedia video, such as stored on VHS tape, Hi8 tape, Mini-DV tape, CD, and VCD, and transfer the video to digital DVD format with the assistance of a computer, such as a personal computer. The video editing and authoring software of the computer can manipulate the video stream by, for example, editing out undesired scenes, changing the sequence of the recorded scenes, add special effects, and dub in sound and music.
Present DVD movie writers processing an analog video stream cannot detect the end of the video stream on the input media; and, therefore, the user manually inputs the length of video that is to be written. Even digital video occasionally lacks an end of video indicator, such as, for example, when the video stream does not have an end-of-episode marker in the video stream.